N83TZ

I finally broke the seal today and started assembling the rudder from the pre-drilled kit.

It was a slow start, as I needed to get up to speed with the Renton Technical College instructor whose shop I have the pleasure of using as I toy with the idea of building a plane. As you’d expect from a shop that prepares Boeing assemblers, it has all of the tools I’ll need — pneumatic drills and rivet pullers; air chucks at every workstation; all of the right drill bits, tool chests full of files, fussy little clamps, deburring tools, machinist’s rules, well-organized clecos, cleco pliers, and everything else you might need to assemble an aluminum airplane. For a sloppy-workbench guy like me it’s a dream!

I’m starting with the skeleton of the rudder. In the course of an hour I got a groove on assembling the spar, first by cleaning off labels and markings off of the pieces, which all have been cut, bent and mostly drilled at the factory.

So far about two-thirds of the work is done to clean, deburr and drill the holes needed to attach the doublers to the spar. It’s super-easy because the spar already has the holes, it’s just a matter of putting in the doubler holes and enlarging holes in the assembled pieces to the final size. Honestly, as a kid I made more complicated plastic models.

I won’t be back on the project until Wednesday. Next week’s goal is to see if I can complete initial assembly of the rudder skeleton in preparation for adding corrosion protection and starting to pull rivets. I’m guessing that dry-assembly work will take no more than several hours.